Chandelier one of the stars of “Phantom — The Las Vegas Spectacular”

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It’s really third-billed, judging by the poster for "Phantom — The Las Vegas Spectacular."

You see the Phantom all right, hovering over a seriously busty version of Christine. And there, behind them? The chandelier.

The one that spectacularly assembles itself each night at the start of the show. Later, for even more thrills, it whooshes down for a simulated crash right over the heads of gold-circle patrons.

It even has a name: Maria.

"The chandelier’s gotten more publicity than any prop in the history of mankind, and I resent it, totally," a deadpan Hal Prince said when he first restaged the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical for its Venetian debut in 2006.

"It never was a show about a chandelier and never will be. But this particular chandelier will deliver, at least, in relation to the amount of talk I’ve heard about the chandelier before."

The famed director might have been overly dismissive of the bauble’s role. The crystal fixture has been vital to "The Phantom of the Opera" since Gaston Leroux’s novel was published in 1910.

The 1925 movie depiction of Lon Chaney’s disgruntled Phantom crashing the chandelier down upon Paris Opera patrons helps make the film one of the few from the silent era still widely seen.

When the musical "Phantom" became the toast of London and New York in the 1980s, much of the excitement was about the automated scenery, one of the first times theater-goers saw the sets magically flow in and out of place.

But a central strategy in restaging the Broadway hit 20 years later on the Strip was to supersize the spectacle to a level not possible on Broadway or countless tours.

There, the chandelier was in three pieces tethered together, starting in a pile at the foot of the stage for the auction-house prologue, and straightening out as it made its grand ascent during the overture.

The Venetian chandelier is named in honor of the late Maria Bjornson, who designed the original production. It is 15 feet tall, 16 feet wide, weighs nearly a ton and comes together in four pieces from four corners of the auditorium — only one of them on the stage.

The chandelier is fundamental to the very design of the custom theater. The rotunda decorated to look like Tiffany glass actually houses a circular base anchoring 32 winches, 16 to lift and 16 to move the pieces around.

Much of the auditorium was built around this installation by Fisher Technical Services of Las Vegas, which programmed late into the night for three months until the show opened in June 2006.

Thanks to the "pre-visualization" of 3-D software, "They had this all designed and working in the computer before the theater was even built," says Bill Stephenson, who is in charge of automation.

The four pieces (the biggest weighs 600 pounds) travel on a system very much like a ski resort’s chair lift. "There are 32 motors with 32 encoders sending back data," Stephenson says. "So each one can, if it wants to, signal a stop and the server will stop motion."

If an encoder thinks a piece has moved too far and halts it, Stephenson corrects any problems and runs "escape cues" to get the pieces back into position from his computer station in the overhead control booth.

The chandelier also has a passenger: a stuntman dressed as the Phantom, who each night buckles himself to a chain motor, squeezes himself in from the top and then drops out the bottom in a harness to frighten the audience.

It’s all down to a routine now. The chandelier gets a dress rehearsal every day, running through its full sequence before the doors open to the audience.

During the show, Stephenson watches several monitors from his bird’s-eye booth, including night-vision cameras to observe stage blackouts and one trained on stuntman Drisco Fernandez as he buckles himself up.

"Stuntman clear," Stephenson announces on his headset as attention turns to the big moment. The chandelier first makes a 5-foot drop to rattle its crystals and get the audience’s attention, before Stephenson clicks a green box on his computer screen to initiate the 35-foot plunge at 18 feet per second.

"As soon as it hits bottom, the whole place goes black. And then it gets out of there," on a return trip of 15 feet per second. When the lights come back up, "It’s up and out of the way, tucked into the stove pipe."

Dramatic sound effects are blasting in the auditorium. But those under the chandelier also hear the very real sound of displaced air. Some get up out of their seats and try to get out of the way.

Others, of course, ask for those seats. If you’re in Section Two, Rows N-P, head’s up. Maria’s on her way.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.